Lara Croft - Videogame History #59 - Retro Review
Since the beginning of video games the female characters were little seen as protagonists, we could only see them as a kind of "trophy" at the end of any game, for example, in Super Mario Bros, our goal was to rescue the princess or in Double Dragon where the bride of the protagonist was kidnapped, the reason for this was because the developers made video games aimed at a specific audience, as indicated by the highest percentage of video players were "men", it was very strange to see any cartridge or CD where it had as main cover a protagonist, only in those games which were considered as childish as it was in the case of Barbie and its multiple games.
A developer company composed of 6 people wanted to change this, they were willing to give it a big turn by giving the protagonism in its entirety to a female character, this company had the name of Core Design, began its project in 1993, taking as reference to the protagonist of the comic "Tank Girl" as a source of inspiration for her main character.
One of the members of this team named Toby Gard was responsible for creating the protagonist, at the end of his first sketches gave the name of Lara Croft, just needed to give a personality in the game, for that based his peculiar story in one of the most acclaimed films of all time, Indiana Jones, taking archeology as their main profession, for being a small group of programmers it took more than 3 years to create the videogame, which at the time of its release was given the name of " Tomb Raider ", as a curious fact the breasts of Lara Croft in their main design were small, but due to a programming mistake (supposedly) at the time of compiling the final code they were larger than expected.
In 1996, the Tomb Raider game for the MS-DOS, Sega Saturn and PlayStation platforms was launched. It caused great curiosity on the part of all the gamers when they saw Lara Croft's great acrobatics skills, implying that she came to the world of video games to stay for a long time, Core Design through certain surveys could determine that the gamer audience was not conformed by only "men" many women began to this great world because Lara Croft was his inspiration for many goals in their lives.
The success of Tomb Raider was impressive, many magazines and TV shows talked about the beautiful Lara, the Core Design team did not hesitate to make several sequels of this video game, Tomb Raider II, III, and The Last Revelations were games that in their moment caused months of entertainment for the gamers of the time, however, there was a time when the saga was seeing something "degraded", this was because its main creator Toby Gard withdrew from the development of its sequels, caused that the companies in charge of advertising the game were taking away the control of ideas within them, wanted to turn Lara into a sexual icon, Gard did not like this because the essence of Lara was not that, so he did not want to be participant of this completely withdrawing from development.
The departure of Toby Gard had great weight for Lara games, because it was clearly noted that they were not equal to their predecessors, the icon of Lara Croft was already being overshadowed by other games, however the time comes that one of the most recognized companies, Escuare Enix, wishes to rescue this great protagonist, he gets in touch with Toby to create a videogame where the story of Lara Croft would be explained, taking into account the main idea of its creator, completely displacing the matter of "Sexual icon", becoming once again one of the best successes in the industry.
Lara will always be a very beloved character in the community, since her first appearances she has always given enough entertainment to the gamers, she even caught the attention of the film industry, taking out 2 movies starring Angelina Jolie and a third one by Alicia Vikander which was recently released, this suggests that there is still enough time to see Lara Croft in our computers and consoles, it is undoubted that left a mark to many gamers who could enjoy its various sequels in the great history of video games.
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See You!!!
wow nice game